Bioshock creator Ken Levin reveals what he hopes to accomplish with his Logan’s Run screenplay. Did another Marvel character join Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.? The co-creator of Sarah Connor Chronicles is working on the Avatar 2 script. David Tennant reveals what it was like to return to Doctor Who. Spoilers!

Top image from Elysium.

Star Wars: Episode VII

A new rumor says that studio space has been booked at England’s Pinewood Studios for the next ten years. A long-term residence like that would allow sets to be easily reused between the different new films, so a decade-long occupancy isn’t exactly surprising. What is slightly less believable is the further rumor that pre-production has been underway for the last three and a half months, and that full-blown production is set to begin sometime this month. That seems deeply unlikely, considering nobody has actually been cast in the film yet, but the making of a Star Wars movie might be such a strange and unique beast that that might just be possible. Anyway, all of this is coming from a supposed inside source — so, as always, take this with a grain of salt. [Jedi News]

Advertisement

X-Men: Days of Future Past

Director Bryan Singer shares some more thoughts on the film: “It takes place in the future and the past and then all over the world, from Russia to China, then France, and Washington, New York. It’s got scope, but most of the scope is in the breadth of the story… It’s its own story, inspired by [the graphic novel] Days Of Future Past… I’d say it’s not a sequel to one of the others. It’s an inbetwequel — that’s what I call it, for lack of a better word. It takes place about ten years, give or take, after X-Men 3; and in the past it takes place about ten years after First Class.” [Empire Online]

Interstellar

Lincoln’s David Oyelowo and Cloud Atlas’s David Gyasi have both reportedly joined the cast of Christopher Nolan’s space epic. They join a cast that already includes Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, Jessica Chastain, Casey Affleck, Topher Grace, Wes Bentley, and John Lithgow. Oh, and also Michael Caine, but that really goes without saying. [The Wrap]

Elysium

Avatar 2

Josh Friedman, best known as the co-creator of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, has reportedly been recruited to work on another James Cameron property, specifically by helping out with the screenplay for Avatar 2. It’s not clear whether this is a full rewrite or something a little less major, and there’s been no comment from any of the parties involved as yet. [The Wrap]

Logan’s Run

Bioshock creator Ken Levine explains why he’s so excited to be writing the screenplay for the new Logan’s Run movie, and what questions he hopes to finally answer:

"As a writer, I owe a great debt to 'Logan's Run,"' said Levine in an interview Monday. "When I saw the movie and read the book when I was 10 years old, it was my first encounter with a dystopia. If you think about the games I make, dystopias are very central to that. If 'Logan's Run' didn't have an impact on me when I was a kid, there wouldn't have been a 'BioShock.'… For me, the first challenge is why people make that bargain. That was never fully answered in the book or the movie to my satisfaction. I really want to answer that question. I want to look at that society in the same way people look at Rapture and Columbia and say, 'OK. I get it. I may not wanna live there, but I get why people are on board."'

Transformers 4

New franchise star Mark Wahlberg is studiously avoiding any discussion of a Dinobot presence in the film, but he does have this to say:

"It feels like a completely different movie, very fresh. Obviously, it's a really interesting dynamic, being a young, single dad having a teenage daughter, trying to succeed as an inventor, having very little means and also trying to provide for my family. Then all hell breaks loose." [MTV]

Here’s a set video from the filming in Detroit. There’s some additional context at the link. [TFLAMB]

Doctor Who

David Tennant discusses his return appearance as the 10th Doctor in the 50th anniversary special:

“When there is more than one of you, as is the case this time, it becomes a slightly different character. The Doctor tends to lead every scene he is in and when you are sharing that out, it becomes slightly different. You have a new relationship with that aspect of the character and that gives you fresh challenges to work on. But it was really good fun actually – and that was a big part of what I enjoyed about this...

I just hope people will be excited by it. But I do not think this is necessarily exclusive, in terms of who it will appeal to. Doctor Who has managed to be a big success over the past few years by being very accessible to everyone. We have never been about going for a highly particular audience – although that audience is the reason Doctor Who has lived for 50 years – but rather to have a very broad appeal. I think that aspect is something that people will feel is quite evident in this special as well.”

According to the CV of Jack Lothian, whose previous writing credits include Skins and Doc Martin, he is one of the writers with a script in development for season eight. [Doctor Who TV]

Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.

David Conrad, whose credits include The Ghost Whisperer and The Good Wife, has reportedly joined the cast in an undisclosed recurring role. It’s possible he’s playing the recently listed role of a “brilliant and quirky scientist,” but that's just speculation. Also, there's some speculation he's playing an existing character from the Marvel Universe, but it's not clear yet. [TV Line]

Under the Dome

Here’s the description for the upcoming episode, “The Fourth Hand”:

BIG JIM AND BARBIE REALIZE THEY HAVE MORE IN COMMON THAN THEY KNEW WHEN A MUTUAL ACQUAINTANCE SHOWS UP IN CHESTER’S MILL, ON “UNDER THE DOME,” MONDAY, AUGUST 19

“The Fourth Hand” – Big Jim and Barbie discover their lives are more intertwined than they knew when a mysterious woman, Maxine, shows up unexpectedly in Chester’s Mill, on UNDER THE DOME, Monday, August 19 (10:00-11:00 PM, ET/PT) on the CBS Television Network.

Person of Interest

The fifth episode of season three will reportedly have the deeply catchy title “PA37ABOP,” and it “will feature a young child called GEN who is a young spy in the making.” [SpoilerTV]

Arrow

CW president Mark Pedowitz discusses the addition of a new character played by Death Valley’s Caity Lotz, who is playing a character who may or may not be both Black Canary and Laurel’s supposedly dead sister Sara:

"I hope she brings a certain amount of conflict since she's playing the sister of Laurel Lance. It's an origin story. I don't know if this character is the Black Canary or not the Black Canary, so it is in origin story. But remember, Laurel Lance was the Black Canary in the DC universe."

There’s more at the link, including some thoughts on the plans to introduce a version of The Flash. [E! Online]

The Vampire Diaries

Showrunner Julie Plec explains why the new season opens with the main characters enrolling in college:

“It’s a time jump. Summer has passed, in which poor Stefan has been suffering at the bottom of the quarry and Damon and Elena have been having hot lovin’ sex. We found a stylized way to show the audience how things went over the summer, what everybody was up to… [Damon and Elena have relationship troubles] in which one is keeping a secret from another trying not to hurt their feelings, trying to make them happy, little things that any normal couple would fight about and then hopefully make up over. The biggest hurdles in their relationship come from external sources, people, ideas, notions that are trying to say they’re not supposed to be together. It’s really going to be more about them fighting to prove that they should be together and it’s okay.”

Plec also says the characters will indeed have to move away to go to college, though not too far away:

“We definitely did not want to have it be the college down the block that all of a sudden out of nowhere there’s a Mystic Falls University, but we knew we had to keep them close enough to home so that they could come and go as they pleased with a little bit of a road trip. It’s so fun because you have this whole fresh new story at college, in the midst of which Damon has to show up there to solve a problem or Elena has to rush home to solve a problem or Caroline comes home for a holiday, so I think that we will have conquered the college curse pretty well.”

The Originals

Here’s a promo.

Defiance

Jim Murray—whose past credits include Primeval, Chaos, and, most importantly, Kröd Mändoon and the Flaming Sword of Fire—is joining the show as a series regular for season two. Here’s the description of his character, per Deadline:

Murray will play Niles Pottinger, the new mayor of Defiance. Appointed by the Earth Republic, Pottinger is shrewd, polished and charming. But his civilized veneer hides a ruthless pragmatist who traffics in information and secrets, and mercilessly punishes those who defy him. His latest object of desire is ex-mayor Amanda Rosewater (Julie Benz).